Two Questions: Exclusive Preview of "T7: Fight Fire with Fire"

"Fight Fire with Fire" is the first collection of the Team 7 title. It is an important book, because it answers two questions still lingering from the 90s, an era that saw a genuine revolution in comics publishing.

Who is Justin Jordan? Comic Vine can tell you. But you won’t need Comic Vine, you’ll discover him as the mind behind his creator-owned property the Luther Strode books, and more recently on writing detail for Deathstroke and Green Lantern: New Guardians, and of course, on the pages of Team 7. Justin is a good writer, but he is a young writer. And not yet having had a long career, is one of the crucial challenges for a book like Team 7.

Team 7 is set five fictive years ago in DC’s New 52 Universe, set during a time when the first superheroes were just emerging, almost at the exact moment we first met the Justice League and Superman (from Action) back in 2011. As one of the books in the Third Wave of the New 52, Team 7 attempts to tie together the present rebooted DC Universe, with a past we’re no longer familiar with. In addition, Team 7 attempts an integration the espionage elements of the Wildstorm Universe with the mainstream of the DCU. Handing this task over to a young writer like Justin at least answers one question about the New 52 reboot—will it be a platform to development incoming talent?

But there is a deeper question than young talent handling iconic properties. There is the question of those iconic properties themselves. When, in 1992, seven high profile artists took a landmark decision to break away from the corporate business model that choked the comics industry throughout the 80s (and as far back as the 50s), two questions were raised. One, would their audience move with them, or would the audience remain loyal to the iconic brands these artists toiled on while working at Marvel? When the new creations of the newly founded Image drew readers in the millions, that question was answered.

But the second question, the more significant one, was whether or not these new characters could become as iconic as the characters the Image founders had worked on at Marvel and DC. That question is yet to be answered in full. But the integration of the Wildstorm Universe with the mainstream DC Universe (Wildstorm being the imprint of Jim Lee, one of those high profile Image founders), goes a ways to getting to that answer.